Honestly, none keeps 100% of every dollar, because card processing (about 2.9% plus 0.30 dollars) is charged by Stripe or your bank, not the platform. But you can keep 100% of the ticket face value by choosing software that takes zero platform cut and pays into your own account: eventcloud, Ticket Tailor and TryBooking all do this.
The honest answer: 100% of face value, not 100% of everything
When a platform promises you keep 100% of your revenue, read it carefully. Nobody can waive the card networks. Visa, Mastercard and your payment processor take roughly 2.9% plus 0.30 dollars on every transaction, and that applies whether you use Eventbrite, a flat-fee tool or your own website. It is the cost of accepting money online.
What a platform absolutely can waive is its own cut: the service fee, the booking fee, the per-registrant charge. That is the number worth chasing. Software that charges zero platform fee and settles into your own Stripe account lets you keep the full ticket face value minus only the unavoidable processing cost. That is as close to 100% as physics allows, and it is a real, measurable difference from the platforms that add their own layer on top.
The three cuts a platform can take from your ticket
Before you can keep your revenue, you need to see where it leaks. There are three separate deductions, and they are easy to confuse:
The platform service fee. Eventbrite charges 3.7% plus 1.79 dollars per paid ticket in the US, per Checkout Page. This is the layer flat-fee platforms remove entirely.
Payment processing. Around 2.9% plus 0.30 dollars, charged by Stripe or the card networks. Unavoidable everywhere, but at least it is predictable.
The payout delay. Not a fee, but a cost. If a platform holds your money until days after the event, that is your cash tied up. Platforms that use your own account skip this entirely.
Keeping 100% of your revenue means killing the first cut, accepting the second, and choosing a model that avoids the third. For the full arithmetic on where the money goes, see our breakdown of how much of a 100 dollar ticket you actually keep.
Which platforms let you keep the most?
Here is what a single 50 dollar ticket leaves in your pocket across the common platforms. Processing is assumed at 2.9% plus 0.30 dollars where you use your own account.
| Platform | Platform cut per ticket | Where the money lands | What you keep on a 50 dollar ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | 3.7% plus 1.79 dollars, plus 2.9% processing | Eventbrite, paid out to you later | About 44.91 dollars |
| Humanitix | 5% plus 1.29 dollars per ticket | Humanitix, then paid out (profits donated to charity) | About 46.21 dollars |
| Cvent | No per-ticket percentage, but licence plus per-registrant fees apply | Usually your merchant account | Most of face value, offset by a large fixed contract |
| Ticket Tailor | Flat 0.30 to 0.85 dollars per ticket, plus your own processing | Your own Stripe or PayPal | About 47.40 dollars |
| eventcloud | Zero per-ticket fee, flat 125 dollars per user per month | Your own Stripe | About 48.25 dollars |
The pattern is clear. The platforms that keep you closest to whole are the ones that charge a flat subscription (or a small flat per-ticket fee) and route money straight to your own account. The gap looks small on one ticket. Multiply it by 5,000 tickets and it is the difference between a saved marketing budget and a donated one.
What Would Zero Booking Fees Save You?
eventcloud charges a flat subscription, not a cut of every ticket. Compare it with what your current platform takes.
What "your own payment account" actually changes
This is the part the fee tables miss. When a platform pays into your own Stripe account, three things improve at once. Your money arrives on Stripe's normal schedule, typically within a couple of days of the sale, not held hostage until after the event. You own the customer payment relationship, so refunds and chargebacks run through your account on your terms. And there is no payout reserve quietly held back against your balance. Keeping 100% of your revenue is partly about fees and partly about never handing custody of your cash to a third party in the first place.
How to check a platform really keeps you whole
Marketing pages love the phrase "keep 100%". Pressure-test it with four questions before you believe it:
Does the money land in my account, or the platform's? If it is theirs, ask exactly when it is released.
Is there any per-ticket or per-registrant fee at all, or only processing? Get the number in writing.
Is a payout reserve held against my balance, and if so, how much and for how long?
Are buyer-facing fees added at checkout? A high fee shown to attendees dents conversion even if it never touches your invoice.
If the answers are "your account, no platform fee, no reserve, no surprise buyer fee", you have found software that genuinely keeps you whole.
Does keeping 100% mean passing fees to attendees?
This is where organisers tie themselves in knots. There are two honest ways to protect your revenue, and they are not the same thing. You can absorb the processing fee and treat it as a cost of doing business, which keeps your ticket price clean and your conversion high. Or you can pass the processing fee to the buyer at checkout, which keeps your face value fully intact but adds a line to the attendee's total. Flat-fee platforms let you choose either, because there is no large platform fee muddying the decision. The trap is a platform that both takes its own cut and passes a chunky buyer fee on top, so the attendee pays more and you still keep less.
Whichever route you choose, show buyers the full total up front. A fee revealed only at the final step is one of the biggest causes of abandoned checkouts, and a lost sale keeps 0% of nothing. Keeping 100% is cleanest when the only fee in the room is processing, and you are the one who decides who carries it.
Who this is not for
Keeping 100% of face value is not automatically the cheapest route for everyone. If you run one small free event a year, there is nothing to keep, and Eventbrite's free tier plus its discovery marketplace may serve you better than any subscription. If you sell a handful of low-price tickets occasionally, a flat monthly fee can cost more than the per-ticket fees it replaces, so do the sum first. And if you need Cvent-grade venue sourcing and enterprise compliance, revenue retention is not the axis you should be optimising on. Flat-fee, own-account software wins for organisers selling real volume who want their money in their own bank, on their own schedule.
If that is you, it is worth seeing the flat model in full on our pricing page, or comparing the retained-revenue numbers directly on our Eventcloud versus Eventbrite page.
